Tag Archives: Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Post navigation

Queensland Ballet is a co-producer of Carlos Acosta’s Carmen with The Royal Ballet and Texas Ballet Theater, which means QB’s name is attached to it forever. I doubt I’ve seen a worse ballet from reputable companies in more than 40 years.

I’m not exaggerating, nor do I say it frivolously. Carmen should never have passed muster at the RB. This is where I should say I can’t understand how it happened, but unfortunately it’s all too common to see serious ballet companies fail to save choreographers from themselves. Mostly the results aren’t quite as bad as Carmen but ballet is littered with the corpses of narrative works whose condition didn’t have to be terminal.

On a brighter note for QB, Liam Scarlett’s Firebird, made for Norwegian National Ballet in 2013, is a brilliant interpretation of Stravinsky’s glittering, gleaming, intoxicating score. Scarlett’s A Midsummer Night’s Dreamis also in the QB repertory and with the addition of Firebird the company has the choreographer’s two most successful new narrative ballets. (I don’t include Scarlett’s staging of Swan Lake – by all reports a huge success – for the RB this month given its firm foundation in the Petipa-Ivanov 1895 version.)

Lucy Green in the title role of Liam Scarlett’s The Firebird. Photo: David Kelly

Scarlett, who is 32, has a youthful, contemporary sensibility that gives Firebird a modern edge while remaining true to the mythic elements of Mikhail Fokine’s original 1910 work for the Ballets Russes.

It looks wonderful, with a monumental set by Jon Bausor, bathed in James Farncombe’s painterly light. In the shadow of a vast tree with claw-like roots, the magical Firebird (Lucy Green at the performance I attended) and wicked sorcerer Koschei (Jack Lister) battle for supremacy, equal in force of will and with a palpable erotic charge between them. She tempts him with a golden apple and strokes his face; he embraces her with ardour. It may well be a game they’ve played for aeons. Then the wandering Prince Ivan (Camilo Ramos) finds his way into their realm and the Firebird finds him interesting. She dances with him, but not as a frightened captive. She dazzles and teases, whispering in his ear as she lets him have one of her precious feathers.

Scarlett effectively contrasts the Firebird’s strength and exoticism with the innocence and playfulness of the young women enslaved by Koschei. Among them is a Princess (Lina Kim), who is tender, curious and alert. Kim and Ramos glowed in their romantic, silken pas de deux and – how delightful! – the Princess is the one who gets to destroy the egg containing Koschei’s soul.

Jack Lister (top) as Koschei in The Firebird. Photo: David Kelly

The end of Koschei’s malign rule means the Princess is free to leave with Ivan although Scarlett – unlike Fokine – is less interested in the happy couple than in the representatives of light and darkness. The lovers quietly disappear and the Firebird exults in her power, although not before paying respect to the dead Koschei in one of Scarlett’s many perceptive details.

Scarlett’s success with narrative ballets has been somewhat patchy but Stravinsky’s music and the original libretto give him the best of roadmaps. Scarlett uses the 50-minute version of the score from 1910, played blazingly by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra with Nigel Gaynor at the helm. Jonathan McPhee’s arrangement is for orchestral forces rather smaller than those asked for by Stravinsky – he wrote for quadruple woodwinds and three harps – but it gets the job done impressively.

Other choreographers of this much-visited work have chosen Stravinsky’s shorter 1945 suite (Balanchine in 1949; the 2009 Graeme Murphy recently revived by The Australian Ballet) but the suites were arranged for concert performance and for dramatic impact it’s hard to go past Stravinsky’s first thoughts.

The cast I saw at the first Saturday matinee was testament to the strong ensemble built by Li Cunxin in his six years as artistic director. Performances were vividly realised all round and Green’s mesmerising Firebird was deservedly greeted with a huge ovation. While his dance is made entirely within the classical idiom, Scarlett gives his Firebird – the Princess too – qualities of independence and authority so often missing on the classical stage. This is particularly welcome in light of how women appear in Carmen although, to be fair, Acosta doesn’t do the men any favours either.

There are problems with Carmen just about everywhere you look. The storytelling is incoherent, skating over the top of anything that might give insights into Carmen’s character. She’s a sex-mad cipher. Don José (Camilo Ramos, backing up after his Prince Ivan earlier) is similarly superficial, just weaker, and therefore deeply uninteresting. Escamillo is there to toss off a whole lot of ballet tricks. There is no Micaëla, no Frasquita, no Mercedes, no context.

What else? Too frequently there’s no apparent relationship between the music (chiefly an arrangement of bits from Bizet’s opera) and the steps performed to that music. A tavern scene veers off into ersatz flamenco territory, indifferently done. Every now and again a man wearing preposterous bulls’ horns and a bit of bondage appears in the background to represent Fate.

Most problematic is the piece’s depiction of desire. Desire can be many things, not just sexual, and in Bizet’s opera it’s Carmen’s burning need to be free. That desire was dangerous for a woman then and still is. Carmen is murdered for her courage, not that this ballet makes you think about it or care. She’s just someone who dances in her underwear and rolls around the floor locking lips with her lovers.

Carmen is at one point surrounded by men who slap the floor vigorously and proceed to strip. It looked to me like nothing less than preparation for gang rape but also looked so ludicrous (think male strippers at a hens’ night) that the audience roared. Ghastly. I think we can safely say that at this point, as at others, there had been insufficient thought given to meaning and tone.

I felt very sorry for the Carmen I saw, Sophie Zoricic, to whom I send condolences. It was a big chance for her and she gave her all. That said, I suspect Carmen could have only the slightest chance of squeaking past the post if stocked with the biggest stars. Acosta danced both Don José and Escamillo during the London premiere season in 2015 and the RB’s most lustrous female principal, Marianela Nuñez, was the first Carmen.

Acosta is, of course, a relatively inexperienced choreographer while having been one of the RB’s most durable stars. Obviously the company wanted to please him. It should have helped him.

QB is on much safer ground with Scarlett. The young Englishman has a deal with the company to present one of his works annually for four years. The artistic associate arrangement started last year with the one-act No Man’s Land, originally made for English National Ballet. (His delectable Dream, a co-production with Royal New Zealand Ballet, was made in 2015 and isn’t counted.)

That leaves two more works to come. Scarlett’s international demand means it’s too much to hope that both would be new creations but I’m told there will certainly be one ballet made on the QB dancers.

The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s wondrously strange, knotty late works. The pitfalls are many but so are the rewards. Compassion, contrition, forgiveness for great wrongs and reconciliation are its towering themes.

Dance gives direct access to such heart-stirring emotions, or does at its best. Christopher Wheeldon and his brilliant collaborators, chief among them composer Joby Talbot and designer Bob Crowley, have created an essentially faithful reading of TheWinter’s Tale that does honour to the text and even improves on it at one point. Along the way they prove the three-act story ballet still has plenty of juice left.

Edward Watson as Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. Photo: Darren Thomas

Leontes, King of Sicilia, believes his wife, Hermione, has broken her marriage vows with his lifelong friend the Bohemian king Polixenes, and a mad obsession takes hold. The fallout is catastrophic as family and friendships are wilfully demolished.

That would be more than enough for a meaty tragedy but it’s just the beginning: The Winter’s Tale seeks the light. A lost child is found, a woman thought dead comes back to life, amity between kings is restored and their offspring fall in love, offering bright hope for the future.

Crowley’s designs are just as potent a narrative element too, juxtaposing the austere formality of the Sicilian court with the buoyant, colour-drenched Bohemian countryside where, 16 years after the events in Sicilia, young lovers Perdita and prince-in-disguise Florizel frolic with friends who are bursting out of their skins with boundless energy and good humour.

The zesty, folk-meets-ballet dances in this second act are intricately constructed, utterly delightful and really do go on too long, although Wheeldon knows his audience. Cheers greeted the outpouring of youthful virtuosity. Francesca Hayward’s fresh, unaffected radiance as Perdita and McRae’s soaring, ardent, fleet-footed Florizel were thrilling.

Apart from Hayward, who replaced the injured Sarah Lamb, on the first night of The Winter’s Tale Brisbane saw the dancers on whom the ballet was made. They included the incomparable Edward Watson as Leontes and, as Hermione’s confidante Paulina, glorious Zenaida Yanowsky, who retires from the Royal after the final Brisbane performance tomorrow (July 9). Yanowsky recently farewelled London audiences after starring in Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand but perhaps she isn’t unhappy that Paulina, the conscience of The Winter’s Tale, truly marks her exit.

Wheeldon gave his most pungent and distinctive choreography to Paulina and the tormented Leontes and Yanowsky and Watson, both superlative dance artists, made starkly expressionistic movement a window into the soul. They were matched in impact by Lauren Cuthbertson’s dignity and strength as the ill-treated Hermione.

Watson wasn’t afraid to walk a treacherously slippery highwire. Leontes is very close to insanity as he insists on believing that Hermione is an adulterer and Watson gave the character something of the extreme intensity seen in silent films. Leontes’s restless, angular movement takes its cue from an agonised speech in Shakespeare’s Act II in which a highly unsettling image is conjured: “I have drunk, and seen the spider,” says the king. Watson looked feverish and distraught in a dangerous, on-the-edge performance.

He was therefore all the more touching when Leontes realises Perdita is the daughter he abandoned (a scene not shown by Shakespeare but related by characters called First Gentleman, Second Gentleman and Third Gentleman). Soon after, Leontes discovers that Hermione, too, is still alive but Wheeldon again departs from Shakespeare by reminding the audience that some things can never be truly mended.

Shakespeare’s Leontes decides to promote a marriage for Paulina, just to round off the happy ending. Wheeldon leaves her alone and mourning. He and Talbot, who collaborated with Wheeldon on the scenario, have revived hope for serious narrative ballet.

Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works is a monumental act of artistic daring, claiming for dance the right, and the ability, to bring one of the great voices in English literature to the stage. The translation from printed word to wordless movement is of necessity very free but McGregor’s profound respect for Woolf is evident at every moment of this shape-shifting triptych. Woolf Works should send every viewer back to her trailblazing novels.

Those who are acquainted at least in passing with Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and, to a lesser extent, The Waves, would get the deepest satisfaction from Woolf Works but no one could fail to be moved and excited. And not just by the dances. The Royal Ballet, which was last seen in Australia in 2002, has in its ranks some of the world’s most distinctive and dramatically alert dancers.

The Royal Ballet in Tuesday from Woolf Works. Photo: Tristram Kenton

Brisbane’s first cast – mostly the same as that in London’s 2015 premiere season – included Edward Watson, whose irretrievably broken soldier in the first part of Woolf Works was heart-stopping; Sydney-born Steven McRae, whose presence and speed were electric; Russian superstar Natalia Osipova, who had charisma to burn; and young principal Francesca Hayward, who darted and floated like a luminous dragonfly.

Above all Woolf Works had the apparently ageless Alessandra Ferri at its centre, as Clarissa Dalloway in the triptych’s first section and as Virginia Woolf in the third. She is still an extraordinarily eloquent dancer and, at 54, brought the wisdom born of experience to these stories of love, remembrance and loss. McGregor’s rigorous intellectualism was taken into another realm, that of deeply affecting emotional resonance.

Alessandra Ferri, centre, in Tuesday. Photo: Darren Thomas

Woolf Works begins with I now, I then, a distillation of Mrs Dalloway. A woman slides between present and past, remembering the joys and possibilities that have now evaporated. We see her glowing younger self (Beatriz Stix-Brunell), the man she might have married (Federico Bonelli) and the young woman she once kissed (Hayward). These shadows and reflections are seen more darkly in the figure of Septimus Smith, the soldier maddened by war. He too is haunted by thoughts of an unreachable ideal companion (Tristan Dyer).

On an austere set of revolving frames by Ciguë, illuminated softly by Lucy Carter’s elegiac lighting, memories float, intersect and dissipate. City sounds – bells, traffic, voices, the tick-tock of a day passing – waft through Max Richter’s superlative score.

McGregor’s choreography is delicate, restrained and very much on a human scale, even for Watson’s Septimus, whose anguish is palpable but tightly reined in. Richter’s music carries the load for him in huge sheets of dark sound, which retreat after Septimus and Clarissa have a moment together that isn’t in the novel but draws the threads together powerfully in the ballet (writer Uzma Hameed was the invaluable dramaturg).

Edward Watson in I now, I then. Photo: Darren Thomas

The wow factor is sky-high in the swaggering second section, Becomings, which takes a flying leap from the shoulders of Orlando into a sci-fi world of Carter’s restless lasers, Moritz Junge’s punk-Elizabethan costumes, Richter’s electronica and top-gear momentum. The dance captures the tumbling energy of Woolf’s writing and a sense of the novel’s race through time although little of Woolf’s witty view of sexual politics.

The speedy, stretchy physicality puts us in more conventional – for him – McGregor territory and the cast of 12 goes at it with ferocious attack. Dancers move in and out of hazy corners to offer a glimpse of Orlando in his/her journey through gender and the centuries. Osipova and McRae are the clear standouts, with McRae doing Olympics-standard higher and faster feats and Osipova stunningly authoritative. She might not entirely bring to mind Woolf’s charming poet, with his “eyes like drenched violets”, but her command is complete.

Natalia Osipova, left, in Orlando. Photo: Darren Thomas

The third section, Tuesday, contracts the multiple interior voices that intertwine in The Waves to a single viewpoint, that of the author as she chooses to end her life. Woolf wrote to her husband Leonard on a Tuesday, telling him how much happiness he had given her and that she could no longer go on. We had heard Woolf herself speaking at the beginning of the evening, in a BBC talk about language. In Tuesday her suicide letter is spoken beautifully in voiceover by Gillian Anderson as the work begins.

Dwarfed against a vast projection of breaking waves (film by Ravi Deepres) and enclosed in Richter’s heart-swelling score, Ferri as Woolf is buffeted by memories. This final short section is both itself and a circle back to the beginning: in an echo of I now, I then, a younger woman (Itziar Mendizabal) poignantly evokes a bright time when everything is still to come. In a further connection, Ferri is partnered tenderly by Bonelli, who gently lifts, tilts and sways her as if he were a ghost figure and she had already been claimed by the water. Virginia Woolf and Clarissa Dalloway, the creator and the created, are inseparable; indivisible perhaps.

A large corps of men, women and children comes and goes in surges like waves and flocks of birds but her aloneness is as complete as it is devastating.

Woolf Works ended on July 1 but more of the Royal’s exceptional dancers come to the Brisbane stage from July 5 in Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale. The Brisbane season marks the first time the Royal has performed Woolf Works and The Winter’s Tale outside the UK, for which much thanks. It’s much more common for a company to decide that international touring requires the safety net, yet again, of Swan Lake.

The Queensland Symphony Orchestra is in the pit, and was in mighty form when conducted by the Royal’s music director Koen Kessels for Woolf Works. Conducting duties for The Winter’s Tale will be divided between QSO music director Alondra de la Parra and Royal Ballet guest conductor Tom Seligman.

Queensland Ballet’s Swan Lake had a 42nd Street quality on opening night as junior company member Joel Woellner was chosen to dance Prince Siegfried alongside the seasoned Odette-Odile of QB principal artist – and former top-ranked star at the National Ballet of Cuba – Yanela Piñera.

Piñera has presence in spades and technical prowess to burn. She laid out her credentials within seconds of taking to the stage with a pure, extended balance on pointe that was an eloquent expression of the Swan Queen’s sorrow and entrapment. As the imposter Odile she decorated the treacherous (for some; not her) fouette sequence with triple pirouettes and gave a magisterial account of her solo.

Piñera nailed the big effects that seem to be a Cuban birthright, including sky-high extensions and Odile’s don’t-mess-with-me grand pirouettes in Act 3 but it was the delicate detail that lingered. Odette’s tiny flutters of foot against ankle in Act II were exquisite.

Woellner was going out a courageous youngster but had to come back a star, or at least as close to one as possible in a nearly impossible assignment. The desperate, deep-seated passion that should drive Siegfried eluded him, resulting in a muted relationship with Odette. There was, nevertheless, gleaming beauty in almost all his dancing. Double tours were plush and precisely landed and lovely air turns finished in stretched, poised arabesques. It was impressive to see how much value he gave each moment, never smudging or cutting steps short. Woellner is not yet a fully-fledged prince but is a hugely promising princeling.

Joel Woellner as Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake. Photo: David Kelly

For the first Swan Lake of his tenure as QB artistic director, Li not surprisingly chose Ben Stevenson’s 1985 version made for Houston Ballet. It makes sense for the size of the company – currently at 32 permanent members and 10 Young Artists – and Li knows the production well, having danced in it in those early days. One can also never underestimate the affection and loyalty Li has for Stevenson, now in his early 80s. Stevenson was responsible for Li’s American career and therefore in a sense all that followed.

It’s a conventional production based on the 1895 Petipa-Ivanov version. Stevenson retains some of the best-known choreography, although much is new. The 1985 designs by David Walker placed Stevenson’s ballet in the late 19th century but for this incarnation QB has borrowed Kristian Fredrikson’s luxuriant Renaissance-tinged designs made for Russell Kerr’s Royal New Zealand Ballet version in 1996.

The beating heart of Swan Lake is the first lakeside act in which Siegfried comes across Odette and her retinue of swan maidens, here a corps of 24 that sensibly incorporates the two Big Swans and four Cygnets. It’s a significant number for a company of QB’s size and was augmented by Queensland Ballet Academy pre-professional students. The teaching is clearly excellent. The corps as a whole looked beautifully schooled and had the strength-in-unity power that makes Act 2 so captivating. (And these dancers have to be strong: Lucy Green, newly appointed soloist at QB, on opening night danced in the Act 1 pas de trois, was a Cygnet in Act 2 and the Spanish Princess in Act 3. This was the night before her Odette-Odile.)

Different details in storytelling mean the fit isn’t always exact between Stephenson’s vision of the ballet and Fredrikson’s designs. The white acts looked wonderful, of course, but in the first and fourth acts it wasn’t always easy to get a grip on all-important distinctions of rank. It was surprising in this respect to see the Queen arrive without a suitable entourage to Siegfried’s coming-of-age celebration, symbolically set in a thick glade through which there’s a glimpse of decaying grandeur.

In Act 3, when foreign princesses are presented to Siegfried so he can choose a bride, the princesses lead the national dance of the country they represent. At RNZB the princesses wore distinctive, decorative tutus; here they are dressed similarly to all the other women in their troupe and dance like entertainers, some friskily showing quite a lot of leg and behaving quite unregally.

Stevenson trims the action significantly, for good and bad. Act 1 is enjoyably fast-paced while shortened Acts 3 and 4 elide with dramatically convincing sleight of hand. I was less convinced by the transition from Acts 1 to 2, in which the Prince dances his yearning solo while his mother (Zenia Tátcheva) pressures – no, harangues – him about the weighty responsibilities of State he must take on. It rather spoils the mood.

With the production coming in at under two hours of dancing, Tchaikovsky’s music at times sounds chopped back to its detriment although at the opening the Queensland Symphony Orchestra under QB music director Nigel Gaynor delivered a sympathetic account of what is there. Concertmaster Warwick Adeney’s violin solos in Act II and III were sublime.

Lina Kim and Victor Estévez in Act 1 of Swan Lake. Photo: David Kelly

Stevenson’s choice of music for Siegfried and Odette’s final pas de deux in Act 4 comes from left field. Tchaikovsky died in 1893 and Riccardo Drigo had a hand in arranging music for the 1895 Petipa-Ivanov production, orchestrating Tchaikovsky’s piano piece Un poco di Chopin, a mazurka, for this section. Drigo smoothed out the mazurka’s prominent accents and slowed the conventionally bright tempo to achieve a romantic quality, but to these ears the music underplays the depths of Siegfried’s agony and contrition. Stevenson, however, obviously feels it better expresses Siegfried’s remorse for having betrayed Odette. In any event, it is rarely heard these days.

Perhaps transcendence was hard to come by on opening night but there was plenty of fine dancing, particularly from Lucy Green, Lima Kim and Victor Estevez as they whizzed and fizzed through the Act I pas de trois. Vito Bernasconi as Von Rothbart didn’t have a huge amount to do but looked imposing, albeit perhaps rather too emphatic in his directions to Odile in the ballroom scene. It was too much of a giveaway.

As is the case in every production I’ve seen, Von Rothbart and Odile are immediately accepted as having a right to be at the ball with no questions asked. It’s always bemusing. (Kevin McKenzie’s American Ballet Theatre version has a red-hot go at dramatic coherence by making Von Rothbart amazingly sexy and charismatic. He makes every woman in the room, including Siegfried’s mother, bewitched, bothered and bewildered.)

Those lucky enough to have tickets for May 11 will see guest artist Evgenia Obratszova from the Bolshoi as Odette-Odile (she also danced on May 9). And at certain performances there is the interesting – but by no means revolutionary – splitting of those roles as Mia Heathcote dances Odette and Neneka Yoshida tackles Odile.

When David Hallberg returned to the ballet stage in Sydney in November last year, in Coppélia with The Australian Ballet, he was coming out of a two-and-a-half year layoff due to injury, the last 12 months of which he spent in Melbourne working with TAB’s medical team. The choice of Franz as a comeback role was unplanned. Coppélia just happened to be what was in the schedule when Hallberg came to the understanding that his dancing career was not, in fact, over as he had feared. Nevertheless, the light-hearted part (a role debut) was just what the doctor ordered.

David Hallberg. Photo: Renee Nowytarger for The Australian. Used with permission.

Hallberg is intensely grateful to the Australians who helped him through his dark hours and said he would be back regularly. He meant it. Last week it was announced Hallberg would be TAB’s first resident guest artist and it was in that capacity that he appeared as Prince Désiré in artistic director David McAllister’s production of The Sleeping Beauty in Brisbane on February 25 and 28. The agreement is that he will be in Australia twice a year, with his second 2017 visit coming at the end of the year in Sydney when The Sleeping Beauty has a return season there.

The 34-year-old American’s exceptional beauty of line and sophisticated bearing make him look born to this repertoire. He is a prince among men with his commanding yet seemingly effortless stage presence and he is the epitome of grace and courtliness. Hallberg gave Désiré (Florimund in other productions) a largeness of spirit not always found in a part that has little complexity of character. Désiré seeks love but needs the Lilac Fairy’s guidance to find it, he dances a little to express his yearning, is shown a vision of the lovely Princess Aurora, wakes the sleeping maiden with a kiss and marries her with much ceremony.

Who this man might be is glossed over, but Hallberg filled out the slender material with passion and tenderness. A clue might be found in something Hallberg said late last year. In a conversation with me about his recovery, he said he had come to Australia “so stripped of any sort of optimism”. In what he called his rebirth, he found perspective. “I feel now, as an artist proudly 34 years old, that I have such depth of resilience, and through that an artistic understanding that’s completely different from how it used to be. And it’s not driven by ego any more.”

His Prince Désiré embodied that selflessness and maturity and even though a handful of less than fully realised finishes were a reminder of his long absence from this cruelly exposed repertoire, the radiance of his performance was all-encompassing. His cabrioles, for example, in which he floated his outstretched legs in the air rather than beat them together as most men do, were not only individual but deeply poetic.

Amber Scott as Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty. Photo: Kate Longley

The quality of his partnering added further layers. Hallberg’s Aurora was TAB principal artist Amber Scott (his Swanilda in Coppélia) and the two look wonderful together, with Scott’s dark, delicate beauty even more lovely when set against the blond Hallberg’s tall, supremely elegant figure. The alchemy of stage rapport is a mystery, but suffice to say Scott seems more lustrous in Hallberg’s company and to project the spun-glass virtues of her dancing more eloquently. Hallberg’s connection with TAB will be wonderful for audiences and he will be a mentor and example for the men of the company, but perhaps his greatest gift is being the partner who brings out the best in Scott. She has often seemed too introverted but Hallberg makes her glow.

The Act III grand pas de deux was as grand as the situation demands yet suffused with intimacy. Individually Hallberg and Scott looked sublime and together they dazzled. I’ve never seen the famous trio of fish dives presented with such élan.

For the rest, with Nicolette Fraillon at the helm the Queensland Symphony Orchestra gave a full-blooded account of Tchaikovsky’s score, senior artist Brett Chynoweth was a buoyant Bluebird, Gillian Revie reprised her striking Carabosse and the fairies, looking a treat in Gabriela Tyselova’s luscious tutus, had more than their fair share of technical jitters. As the Lilac Fairy soloist Valerie Tereschenko showed her great promise and her relative inexperience. Her fragrant upper body and clearly articulated mime were lovely but she had a few too many slips. Another new soloist, Jade Wood, gave a good account of Princess Florine although her fixed expression betrayed tension. Still, the company (this year expanded to 77 in number) has plenty of up and coming talent – and needed it in Brisbane, as a fair handful of more senior dancers had niggles that kept them offstage.

McAllister has made some welcome tweaks to his 2015 production to clarify some of the early storytelling although, as with so many productions, the need to bring the show in at under three hours makes some aspects appear rushed. The excision of most of the Act III divertissements while still giving a flavour of them is astutely done but the account of the court in the Prologue is too abbreviated. That charge can’t be directed at Tylesova’s design, which on each viewing looks more opulent than ever.

Footnote: Hallberg’s Australian commitment is in addition to his other jobs as a principal artist with American Ballet Theatre and the Bolshoi Ballet, although it’s not clear yet when he might be dancing again with the latter. For ABT he is first cast in Alexei Ratmansky’s new Whipped Cream, opening in Costa Mesa, California, on March 15 and he will then dance Onegin and possibly Albrecht in New York in ABT’s May-July season.

The Sleeping Beauty ends in Brisbane March 4. Then Melbourne, June 16-27 and Sydney, November 11-25.

Angelin Preljocaj’s Snow White oozes sex, glamour and fantasy in a visually ravishing production that juxtaposes a monumental, golden-hued court with the mysterious vibrations of the deep forest.

It’s an extravagant world of abseiling dwarfs, luscious nymphs, huntsmen who look like tough mercenary soldiers, a dead mother who flies – literally – to her stricken daughter’s side and an unearthly sacrificial stag.

The familiar narrative is essentially intact but given an erotic charge. It’s clearly a version for grown-ups when costuming duties are taken by Jean Paul Gaultier, whose designs are witty and revealing in more ways than one. The Queen, enraged by her stepdaughter’s maturation into a desirable woman, has the kinky attire of a classy dominatrix (although ends as a Bob Mackie-era Cher lookalike); Snow White is dressed in blinding, virginal white but her gown is exceptionally revealing of hip and thigh. She looks fetchingly juicy. Her Prince comes out of proceedings less well, being asked to sport tight matador-like trousers in an unbecoming shade of apricot, but otherwise everyone looks fabulous.

Emilie Lalande in Ballet Preljocaj’s Snow White

As an image-maker Preljocaj is a winner. The Queen’s cramming of the poisoned apple into Snow White’s mouth is vicious and horrifying – a violent counterpoint to the Prince’s earlier gift to Snow White of a feather-light red scarf that at one point gently covers her face. The deaths that open and close the piece are strikingly staged and it was an inspiration to recast the dwarfs as floating, tumbling miners.

Choreographically and structurally things are much more mixed. Certainly the passionate pas de deux for Snow White and the Prince hit the mark, although the awakening scene will rather remind balletomanes of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. But a long court dance early in the piece exhausts its charms far more quickly than it ends, a fate that affects almost every part of the piece. Each is simply too long for the material – ballet and folk-flavoured contemporary dance – Preljocaj has devised for it. As well as oozing sex Snow White oozes sluggishness.

The Grimm brothers’ story is short and sharp. Preljocaj should have heeded their gift for compression or, in a piece that lasts nearly two hours, taken the opportunity to colour in the relationship between the King and the Queen.

And disappointingly, Snow White hammers home the tired trope of female vanity in the face of ageing but doesn’t have anything to say about society’s brutal rules about how one should look.

On opening night Emilie Lalande was a gorgeous Snow White, fresh, sensuous and strong. Redi Shtylla had some remarkably ugly choreography as the Prince but partnered Lalande heroically. Cecilia Torres Morillo had little more to do than stalk about and posture as the Queen but did so ferociously.

The music – slabs of Mahler with added electronic atmospherics from 79 D – often didn’t suit the choreography but was satisfyingly played by Queensland Symphony Orchestra with Johannes Fritzsch conducting.

Snow White ends on September 11. The performance on Thursday September 8 will be live-streamed by Queensland Performing Arts Centre.

It is something of an understatement to say Greg Horsman knows The Sleeping Beauty well. Not only was it the first ballet he saw, the one that made him want to be a dancer, it was a key role for him. Among the stages on which he performed as Prince Désiré are the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and St Petersburg’s Mariinsky, where The Sleeping Beauty was brought to life in 1888.

Now ballet master at Queensland Ballet, Horsman has revived the production he created in 2011 for Royal New Zealand Ballet, a company of similar size to QB (he was ballet master there before coming to QB). This Sleeping Beauty isn’t one for the purists given the changes Horsman has made to what is considered the usual text, but it is a highly attractive and satisfying one. The production has an appealing human scale without sacrificing any of its fairy tale magic. The broad strokes of the familiar legend are there, shaped into a narrative that Horsman fills out with many original, felicitous details. It’s not a hugely grand Sleeping Beauty but one that beguiles with its unfailingly clear storytelling – there is quite a lot of mime, all of it instantly legible – and wonderful concentration on character rather than effects.

Alina Cojocaru and Chi Cao in The Sleeping Beauty. Photo: David Kelly

Horsman makes a virtue of transforming the ballet for medium-sized forces (QB has 31 dancers at present and eight young artists). The ballet has only one interval and a very brief pause between acts II and III, Horsman excises and conflates characters stylishly, gracefully interweaves the fairies from the Prologue throughout the action, builds up the wicked fairy Carabosse’s role enjoyably and keeps pomp to a minimum. It might seem odd to describe The Sleeping Beauty – the ultimate achievement in Russian Imperial-era ballet – as an intimate experience, but that’s how it felt.

Horsman’s first surprise comes early. The curtain rises on Catalabutte fussing around with the invitations to Aurora’s christening and, guess what? He’s a cat. You shake your head for a moment and then think, well, why not? This isn’t a palace unacquainted with non-humans, as the influx of fairies, sparkling emissaries from the supernatural realm, indicates. It’s lovely how the latter keep turning up, all bright and full of good cheer, to keep an eye on things. Their recurring presence gives the ballet a strong spine.

In a lively piece of characterisation Carabosse is presented as an impossibly glamorous contemporary of the good fairies, the kind of young woman who would have led the pack of mean girls at high school and graduated from university with a higher degree in viciousness. Clare Morehen at the first performance and Eleanor Freeman at the second invested Carabosse with super-model confidence and glossiness with their high-flying jetés and insolent stares. I particularly liked the link-up with the good fairies, all of them holding hands and dancing in unison, as perhaps they once all did in happier days. Carabosse also has quite a trick up her sleeve for later, when the prince fights his way to the sleeping Aurora.

Clare Morehen (centre) as Carabosse. Photo: David Kelly

I was constantly taken with how carefully Horsman makes sure the world he creates is consistent in tone throughout. The garland dance, for example, is a relaxed affair for a group of young palace gardeners and their girls rather than the entire village putting on a formal show for Aurora’s 16th birthday. The hunt scene is for Prince Désiré, two friends and his tutor only. The Act III wedding dispenses with all the usual fairy tale characters except the cats – yes, that would be Catalabutte and his wife, Lady Florine – and Bluebirds, who arrive in a cage as a wedding gift and are, of course, catnip to Catalabutte, much to the audience’s delight.

It was striking how fresh, individual and lively everyone was, in particular the zesty women. New QB principal, Argentinian-born Laura Hidalgo, was a luscious Bluebird and I would very much like to see her Aurora. At the second performance junior soloist Teri Crilly enchanted with her sparky, darting Bluebird (she was, not surprisingly, in the first cast as the fairy who bestows the gift of Song on Aurora). All the fairies distinguished themselves but special mention goes to soloist Lisa Edwards, the fairy of Beauty in the first cast and fairy of Grace in the second. She has a very appealing aura of calm and mystery.

All Horsman’s inventions sit easily around the traditional set pieces for Aurora, danced on opening night by guest artist Alina Cojocaru. Formerly with The Royal Ballet and now with English National Ballet, Cojocaru is widely considered to be the Aurora of her generation. She radiates light and joy from a tiny body that gives the impression not only of being buoyed by the music but indivisible from it. Her dancing is brilliant, each moment etched with great precision, yet everything feels as if it is the inspiration of that moment. Most potent of all is her warm generosity, seen in abundant, open-hearted gestures and an intense gaze that encompasses the entire theatre. She is an extraordinary artist.

Chi Cao and Alina Cojocaru. Photo: David Kelly

At the second performance QB’s glamorous principal artist Yanela Piñera, formerly with the National Ballet of Cuba, danced Aurora with a similarly bounteous engagement with the audience. I would venture she isn’t perhaps entirely a natural Aurora temperamentally speaking – Piñera has a very sophisticated quality – so Act III was a better fit for her than Act I, although her dancing is very fine indeed. She can achieve a triple pirouette with the lightest of touches, unrushed and unshowy, as a demonstration of delight and wonder rather than display of technique.

Guest artist Chi Cao, from Birmingham Royal Ballet, partnered Cojocaru elegantly, although at the second performance I found QB principal Hao Bin a more ardent prince who made more of the awakening kiss, which is given pride of place – far from always being the case – in Gary Harris’s extremely effective set. There are intimations of soaring Gothic arches, a storybook forest for the vision scene and a moveable gazebo that enables the kiss to have the dramatic impact it often lacks. A pity, though, about the very loud clunking when it’s moved about.

QB’s music director-designate Nigel Gaynor conducted the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in a sumptuous performance of Tchaikovsky’s greatest ballet score. The QSO’s playing made one wish we were hearing the whole score, but of course we weren’t. It was cut – but then it always is. Companies always want to bring the ballet in at three hours or less and Horsman, by having only one interval instead of two, manages a brisk two and a half hours.

So Horsman makes the usual nips and tucks (the hunt scene, entr’actes, Act III jewel variations), which isn’t much of a surprise. But his most surprising cut isn’t really to do with length; it’s about that coherent world view for the ballet. Except for a tantalising bar or two, the blazing, magisterial, hymn-like processional on which the ballet usually ends is gone, replaced by music associated with the Lilac Fairy. The usual salute to the splendour of the monarchy – and its continuation through the union of Aurora and Désiré – gives way to a couple in love being blessed by the Lilac Fairy, also called the fairy of Wisdom.